Skip to main content

Replace FeedBurner Email Subscriptions with FeedMail

In July 2021 Google disabled FeedBurner's email notification feature. This was used by many blogs to let their users subscribe by email. It was especially common with Blogger users via the "FollowByEmail widget" which was backed by FeedBurner.

There are many alternatives for this widget with different feature sets. FeedMail is one option worth considering. In fact FeedBurner's shutdown was one of the motivating factors for the creation of FeedMail! Our founder wanted to provide email subscriptions to his blog, but all of the available options were expensive, difficult, had ads or were loaded with non-optional tracking links.

Pros

  • Multiple cost options:
  • Integration is easy, just link to your subscription page.
  • Driven by your RSS feed just like FeedBurner. No backend changes required.
  • Real-time if your feed supports WebSub. (Blogger does)

Cons

Since FeedMail is a privacy-focused and subscriber focused service there are a couple of features that you may miss from publisher-focused services.

  • No visibility into subscriber information, including email addresses.
  • No open and click tracking.
  • Currently no subscriber-count information. (If you are interested in this get in touch, we are considering providing basic anonymized information.)

Setup

  1. Go to the New Subscription page on FeedMail.
  2. Enter your blog's URL and click "Go"
  3. Copy the URL. This is your subscription link.

You can share that link with your users however you want. For example add a "📨 Subscribe via Email" link to your blog template.

  <a href="YOUR LINK HERE">📨 Subscribe via Email</a>
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Digests are Coming

Up to this point FeedMail has only supported real-time notifications. Meaning that every feed update immediately produces a single email. However this is about to change! When we asked for feedback on the features you would like to see in FeedMail we had a number of users reach out saying that they wanted a way to batch notifications together. We saw two main reasons for this: To reduce noise in their inbox. For some high-volume feeds users wanted to be able to quickly skim, then delete the entire batch in one go. While deleting one-by-one offers more flexibility, the bulk option is easier for high-volume feeds. To reduce costs. While we believe that our prices are incredibly reasonable, they can add up if you are getting lots of updates. For example if you follow a feed that updates every 15min that will be about $35 a year (or half price if you buy your credits in bulk). Not super expensive but maybe more than you want to spend for a single feed! Digests provide and option for cost
Post a Comment
Read more

Digests Leave Beta

Thanks everyone who has helped evaluate digests over the past weeks. All of the blocking issues are now resolved and we will be releasing them soon. Once digests are officially released there will be links to them from the FeedMail site and pricing information added to our homepage. Price Increase Part of the purpose of the beta was to evaluate the cost of providing digests and see how they would be used. We have decided upon final pricing which we hope will be sustainable for years to come. Digests issues will cost 1 credit per 5 feeds. Note that this is feeds included in an issue , not total feeds that target a particular digest. It also does not matter how many new items a feed has. So if you have a digest with 200 feeds configured but this morning's issue only has new items from 2 of them it will cost 1 credit. If 14 feeds update the next day that issue will cost 3 credits. If the day after has no updates it will cost nothing. This new pricing takes effect no earlier than 202
Post a Comment
Read more

Update to Date-based Entry Ignoring

TL;DR FeedMail will now ignore new items 7 days older than a previously seen item. This is expected to affect almost no "true" new posts. In theory checking to find new entries for a feed is a simple process. Download the feed. Check the ID of each entry to see if you have seen it before. However the real world is much messier. It is recommended for feed IDs to be URLs (to ensure global uniqueness) however this results in many feeds just using the URL that the article is available at. However these URLs sometimes change, and poorly designed feed generators update the ID of existing entries to the new URL. From a protocol point of view these are completely new entries, however to a user these are duplicates. In order to reduce the effect of this common issue on our our users FeedMail has some simple mitigations for posts that have recorded published dates. If the entry is older than a year always ignore it. If the entry is older than the 10th newest post in the feed ignore it.
Post a Comment
Read more